THE old man, contrary to his practice, was a little late for the midday meal, and he had a poor appetite for it. As he tried to eat the cold mutton and the potato William had baked for him, his thoughts seemed a long way from his plate. William himself, who was too full of trouble to give much attention to food, now saw that the old man’s earlier ferocity, which had hurt him even more than it had puzzled him, had yielded to a depth of melancholy that was hardly less disturbing. But the master’s manner, on his return from the visit to Mr. Thornton, was far more in accordance with his nature, at least as William understood that nature; indeed, his voice had recaptured the note of pathos which seemed natural to it whenever the Van Roon was mentioned.
“I ought to tell you, boy,” he said, in a husky tone, towards the end of the meal, “that it looks as if there’ll be the dickens to pay over this job. A French detective from Paris has been here, and he’s coming again this afternoon to have a word with you.”
“With me, sir?”
The old man, whose eyes were furtively devouring the face of William, was quick to observe its startled look. “Yes, boy, you’re the one he wants to see. The Loov authorities have managed to get wind of this Van Roon of ours, and they say it’s the feller they’ve been looking for since 1898.”
Easy to gull William in some respects was, yet, he could not help thinking that the French Government took a little too much for granted.
“I think so, too—but there it is,” said the old man. “They have to prove the Van Roon is theirs, and that won’t be easy, as I told the detective this morning. But I understand that the question of identity turns upon certain marks, as well as upon similarity of subject.”
William allowed that the subject had an undoubted similarity with that of the picture stolen from the Louvre, but then, as he explained, every known Van Roon had a strong family likeness. In size they varied little, and they always depicted trees, water, clouds, and in some cases a windmill.
“Ours, I believe, had no windmill.”
“No, sir, only water and trees, and a wonderful bit of cloud.”
“I understand,” said the old man mournfully, “that the one that was stolen from the Loov had no windmill.”
“The other one in the Louvre has no windmill; there are two at Amsterdam that have no windmill; and there’s one at The Hague, I believe, that hasn’t a windmill.”
“May be. These are all points in our favour. But, as I say, the whole question will turn upon certain identification marks, and this French detective is coming here this afternoon to examine it. So it seems to me that the best thing you can do is to go off at once, and get it back from that hussy, because you can take it from me, boy, that we are going to be held responsible for the picture’s safety by the French police; and if when the detective calls again all we have to say is that it has vanished like magic, and we are unable to produce it, we may easily find ourselves in the lock-up.”
This speech, worded with care and uttered with weight, had the effect of increasing William’s distress. Underlying it was the clear assumption that he was in league with June, and this was intolerable to him, less because of her strangely misguided action, than for the reason that the master to whom he had been so long devoted found it impossible to believe his word.
“If only I knew where Miss June was, sir—” he said, miserably.
The old man, with the fragment of caution still left to him, was able to refrain from giving William the lie. It wasn’t easy to forbear, since he was quite unable to accept the open and palpable fact that his assistant was in complete ignorance of June’s whereabouts. So true it is that the gods first tamper with the reason of those whom they would destroy!
S. Gedge Antiques was in the toils of a powerful and dangerous obsession. He saw William in terms of himself; indeed, he was overtaken by the nemesis which dogs the crooked mind. For the old man was now incapable of seeing things as they were; the monstrous shadow of his own wickedness and folly enshrouded others like a pall. One so shrewd as William’s master, who had had such opportunities, moreover, of gauging the young man’s worth, should have been the last person in the world to hold him guilty of this elaborate and futile deceit; but the old man was in thrall to the Frankenstein his own evil thoughts had created.
He was sure that William was lying. Just as in the first instance the young man had given the picture to “the hussy”, he was now in collusion with her in an audacious attempt to dispose of it. S. Gedge Antiques was not in a frame of mind to sift, to analyze, to ask questions; it seemed natural and convenient to embrace such a theory and, urged by the demon within, he was now building blindly upon it.
About three o’clock William was engaged in the lumber room putting derelict pieces of furniture to rights, when his master came with a long and serious face, and said that the French detective wanted to see him. William put on his coat and followed the old man into the shop where he found two persons awaiting him. With only one of these was William acquainted. Mr. Thornton was well known to him by sight, but he had not seen before the French dealer, M. Duponnet.
With a nice sense of drama on the part of S. Gedge Antiques the Frenchman was now made known to William as M. Duplay of the Paris police. Midway between a snuffle and a groan, the old man, raising his eyes in the direction of heaven, besought his assistant to tell Mussewer all that he knew as to the picture’s whereabouts.
William, alas, knew no more than his master; and he found no difficulty in saying so. He was not believed, since the old man had had no scruple in the blackening of his character, and the Frenchman, with a skilful assumption of the manner of an official, which the others solemnly played up to, proceeded to threaten the assistant with the terrors of the law.
The French Government was convinced from the description, which had been given of the Van Roon by those who had seen it, that there could be little doubt it was their long missing property. Such being the case, the police were only willing to allow the young man another twenty-four hours in which to produce it for examination. If he failed to do that within the time specified, a warrant would be applied for, and he might find himself in prison.
In the face of this intimidation, William stuck to his story. He knew no more than the dead where the picture was; Miss June, to whom it had been given, had suddenly disappeared with it the previous night.
“Who is Mees June?” said the Frenchman sharply.
Miss June was the niece of Mr. Gedge.
“And he gave the picture to her?” The disappointed buyer, who felt that his suspicions in the matter were being confirmed, looked keenly from the young man to the old.
“No, sir,” said William, with the utmost simplicity. “I gave it to her myself.”
There was a pause, in which astonishment played its part, and then Mr. Thornton gravely interposed: “How do you mean you gave her the picture? It isn’t yours to give. It is the property of your master.”
“You are forgetting, boy,” said the old man in a voice in which oil and vinegar were wonderfully mingled, “that I would not allow my niece to have such a valuable thing, and that you then made it over to me to dispose of to the best advantage.”
“I gave it to Miss June,” persisted the young man simply, “but I told her that, as you had set your heart upon it, I hoped very much she would let you have it.”
While this odd conversation went on, the two dealers exchanged glances. Both were greatly puzzled. They were as one in being a little suspicious of the absolute bona fides of S. Gedge Antiques. Either this was a very clumsy method of establishing them, or there was more behind the picture’s disappearance than met the eye.
S. Gedge Antiques, whose brain was working at high pressure, was not slow to read their minds. He closed the discussion with a brevity which yet was not lacking altogether in persuasion. “There’s no time, boy, to go into all that,” he said. “The girl’s gone off with the picture, and wherever she’s to be found, you must go right away, and get it back from her, and bring it here to me, or we may both find ourselves in the lock-up. That is so, Mussewer Duplay—what?” And with a lively gesture the old fox turned to the Frenchman.
Puzzled that gentleman certainly was, yet he heartily agreed. If the Van Roon was not produced within the next four and twenty hours, a warrant would be issued.
“Where is the hussy? That’s what we want to know,” said the old man. “Tell us what has become of her.”
Frankly William did not know. He was not believed, at any rate, by his master who by now was deeper than ever in the coil of his own crookedness. As for the two dealers who, between them, had contrived, as they thought, to acquire one of the world’s treasures for an absurd sum, they did not know what to think. The comedy they were performing at the instance of S. Gedge Antiques was designed to bemuse the assistant, yet both men had an uneasy feeling at the back of their minds that master and man were engaged in a piece of flapdoodle for their private benefit. If so, the old man was a fool as well as a rogue, and the young one was a rogue as well as a fool. Scant was the comfort to be got out of this reflection. They seemed very far from the goal on which their hearts were set; and impatience of such methods was just beginning to show itself in the bearing of Messrs. Duponnet and Thornton when the affair took a new and remarkable turn.